Saturday, March 12, 2016

Just found this list from pretty much 20 years ago - probably written sometime around May 1996 while bored during several classes - and figured we would relay it here. This was months prior to a bizarre 18 month span of high school when we loved Phish but didn't like Nirvana. Extremely high school. Many lolz to be found. Some ridiculous choices.

Almost completely free of R&B, soul, hiphop, new wave, dance music or mainstream pop. High school made those genres seem scary. INXS and Def Leppard are probably the most quintessentially '80s things here. There's a Squeeze song in there somewhere. It's almost entirely free of indie rock, with a few bizarre exceptions like Sonic Youth or Ween.

Some notes:
- As strange as this may seem, the list is ordered. "A Day In The Life" was our choice for the all time greatest song, and so on.
- The big winner here was clearly The Beatles with a whopping 30 songs, not including 9 solo John Lennon songs and 7 solo Paul McCartney songs.
- Runners up include Phish (21 songs), Jimi Hendrix (21 songs), Pink Floyd (16 songs), The Police (13 songs), The Who (13 songs), The Doors (11 songs), Led Zep (10 songs) and Pearl Jam (10 songs). Eric Clapton also appears in 11 songs: 4 with Derek and the Dominoes, 3 with Blind Faith, 2 with Cream, 1 with John Mayall and 1 solo song.
- Nirvana appears 7 times, although 5 of those songs curiously fall between #351 and #401 and the remaining 2 were b-sides. Even stranger, the only Nirvana song in the Top 200 is "Marigold" - a song written by Dave Grohl. It appears at #95, while no songs by Foo Fighters made the cut at all.
- Other notable artists with multiple inclusions: Elton John (7), Jethro Tull (7), Frank Zappa (7), Billy Joel (6), Yes (6), Queen, (6), The Eagles (6), Boston (6), Steve Miller Band (5), Grateful Dead (5), Rolling Stones (5), Ween (4), Badfinger (4), Todd Rundgren (4), David Bowie (4), The Moody Blues (4), Paul Simon (4), and Edgar Winter (4). (Steve Winwood appears in 6 songs between Blind Faith, Spencer Davis Group and Traffic.)
- The only song here that was actually released in 1996 is Rage Against The Machine's "Vietnow" (#374) which had only been out for 6 weeks at the time this list was written. Bush's "Machinehead" (#241) was not released as a single until April 1996, although it appears on their debut 1994 LP.
- Pretty sure we've never actually heard the song at #271, Randy Crawford's "Rio de Janeiro Blue" from 1981.
- Many of these choices are blocks of songs from albums, similar to how classic rock stations would occasionally group album segments with segues and transitions intact.

what's it?

TASTE MY KIDS compiles recommendations for a happier and healthier existence, most often in the form of "best-of" lists, youtube posts, album or movie reviews, and various scribblings. We lived on Geocities starting in August 2000. In January 2009, times got tough and posts were on hiatus until a new host could be located. Geocities eventually died anyway, and now we live on blogspot. True story.